Rice Notebook: Football players get back on track

Trio the latest to participate in both sports

MOISEKAPENDA BOWER, Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Published
6:30 am CST, Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Last weekend in College Station, three football players — tailback Sam McGuffie, receiver John Welch and punter Kyle Martens — joined the track team and competed in the Texas A&M Invitational, continuing a symbiotic relationship between track coach Jon Warren and the football staff that has thrived for years.

Warren has long welcomed football players with track backgrounds into his program. He is acutely aware of the athletes who participated in both sports in high school, so when they show a sincere interest in continuing both careers at Rice, Warren helps provide the competitive environment those athletes seek.

“They bring up the idea of running track while they’re here,” Warren said of football players. “That’s something (football) coach (David) Bailiff has been real good about here. The only reason he has an issue running track is if they have an academic question. Otherwise, he is supportive of it. It definitely comes from their end.

“We don’t recruit them so much as they decide they want to do it, and they work it out with their offseason conditioning (with football) to mix the two together.”

McGuffie and Welch ran the 60-meter dash while Martens participated in the high jump. The time commitment to both programs is taxing, but if athletes prove capable of managing their academic schedule as well as the toggling between the indoor season, spring football and outdoors, the choice is theirs.

Tailback Sam McGuffie is one of three Rice football players who recently joined the track team.

Tailback Sam McGuffie is one of three Rice football players who recently joined the track team.

Photo: EDWARD A. ORNELAS, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Photo: EDWARD A. ORNELAS, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

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Tailback Sam McGuffie is one of three Rice football players who recently joined the track team.

Tailback Sam McGuffie is one of three Rice football players who recently joined the track team.

Photo: EDWARD A. ORNELAS, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Rice Notebook: Football players get back on track

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“Every football player we’ve ever dealt with has been awesome,” Warren said. “My guess is because they don’t have to do this. There’s nothing that compels them for any practical reason. They want to do it.”

Derras Wilmington (hurdles), Gabe Luke (400), Nigel Codrington (high jump) and Ed Howard (javelin) all excelled in track and field after making the transition from football. That list should continue to grow.

“These young men that want to do it have the ability to do it, and they have a desire to do it,” Bailiff said. “I don’t know of any coach that doesn’t want their players involved with the track team. That means you’re recruiting the right athletes.”

Kaaiohelo tabbed

Kaaiohelo joined the Kansas staff in 2007 after spending three years as strength and conditioning coach at Central Oklahoma. He had worked in the private sector prior to his delving into intercollegiate athletics.

Kaaiohelo played at Arkansas and Missouri Southern, where he was a teammate of McKnight.

“When you first sat down with him, he was highly organized in his presentation to us,” Bailiff said of Kaaiohelo, one of five candidates who visited campus. “He had taken a lot of time, and in great detail, to show us exactly how he was going to approach the transition. This is not where you have to change the culture; the job is now where you’ve got to win these young men’s hearts and minds. They already work hard.

“I felt after visiting with him that he was the one that could develop them, and he was the one that would win their hearts and minds the fastest.”

Women’s team rebounds

With the ominous specter of a winless conference record closing in, the women’s basketball team produced a shocking 62-54 home win over Tulane on Saturday that snapped an 11-game losing skid.

Tulane throttled the Owls 91-63 in New Orleans on Jan. 11, so the Green Wave seemed an unlikely upset candidate. However, the Owls (6-19, 1-11) seized control early and held on late to record their first Conference USA victory.

“When we got to 11 (consecutive losses), 0-16 was getting closer to being a possibility,” Owls coach Greg Williams said. “We really hadn’t shown that we were playing better game after game. We weren’t showing progress, and that was probably the scariest part of the whole scenario.”

“Losing 11 straight games chips away, both individually and as a team, at your confidence level.”